


this isn't our first time around

by winterfire22



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Amputee Eddie Kaspbrak, Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier Are Best Friends, Deadlights (IT), Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Established Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, M/M, Minor Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Multiverse, Nightmares, Reddie, but he survives, eddie loses his arm in this verse like in the book, eddie's just asleep so like he's not rlly involved in this narrative, haha i refuse to let eddie die in ANY of my fics so go ahead and jot THAT down, there are multiple verses, why won't any film adaptation take his arm??
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-13 16:22:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20585450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterfire22/pseuds/winterfire22
Summary: when you look into the deadlights, you get bad dreams, and you have whispered 2am phone calls with your only friend who gets it.





	this isn't our first time around

_lost love is sweeter when it's finally found_  
_i've got the strangest feeling_  
_this isn't our first time around_

+

_ “I have something to tell you,” Eddie says._

_ “What is it, buddy?” Richie asks breathlessly._

_ “I fucked your mom.”_

_ Eddie laughs. Richie does too, a little. It’s a reassurance. Eddie wouldn’t be making ‘your mom’ jokes if he was dying, right? Who in their right mind would be making ‘your mom’ jokes with their last breath?_

_ Richie holds a wadded up jacket to the gaping wound on his chest. (he’s gonna be okay, there’s no way i’m walking out of here without him, he’s going to be fine, we just have to finish with this fucking clown and then get him to a hospital and he’ll be fine)_

_ He leaves Eddie tucked against the wall, the jacket still against his wound, gravity helping with the bleeding situation since he’s laying down. _

_ When Richie comes back a moment later, he’s dead. _

+

Over the past year Richie has had many dreams about going back to Derry to defeat It. Sometimes it’s 2016 and he ends up sobbing in the quarry, his cracked glasses clutched in his hand. Sometimes it’s 1990 and Eddie looks different. Sometimes it’s 1986 and they’re still somehow adults instead of kids-- that one really doesn’t make sense, but then again, none of this actually makes any sense. 

Sometimes Richie has glasses, sometimes he has contacts, sometimes he looks different, sometimes he’s dressed different, but he always pukes.

(why the fuck is that the thing that has to stay constant between real life and all the dream versions?)

(actually okay i’d much rather have that be the constant than)

(than)

He refuses to finish the thought. Because in every single dream, no matter their other variations, Eddie never makes it out of the sewers. In every single dream, Richie watches him die, an unfinished sentence barely out of his mouth.

+

He wakes up all at once, frantic, gasping for air, his pulse slamming in his head. He looks around the room. It’s not pitch dark, but the blur of his terrible vision coupled with the near-darkness makes the room unknowable. Fumbling, he reaches for his glasses and shoves them on. Uses the dim light of his phone screen as a flashlight, shining it clumsily around the room.

Around his bedroom. In his house. In California. Far away from Maine.

And curled up next to him--

“Fuck,” Richie mutters under his breath. His shaky hand reaches for Eddie’s chest. Presses against his beating heart.

Curled up, asleep, down an arm, but alive. And he’s not just alive-- he’s _here._

“Fuck,” Richie whispers again, taking his hand back, rubbing at his face, dislodging his recently-replaced glasses. 

(okay calm down edge lord he’s fine he’s right there he’s clearly alive it was just a stupid dream)

He feels jumpy. Flighty. Terribly awake.

(aaaaaaaaahh okay maybe go calm down in the bathroom so you don’t wake him up though)

Trying to be as quiet as possible, he gets out of bed. Still clutching his phone, he makes his way into the bathroom, closing the door slowly. He takes his glasses off and splashes cold water on his face because that’s what people do in the movies. It does nothing except make his face wet. 

Sighing, he wipes his face off on the hand towel and replaces his glasses. 

It’s been going on all year. Not every single night, nor even every week, but often enough that it’s pervasive and loud and maddening. He hasn’t mentioned it to Eddie once. How could he? The morning after the first dream, Eddie had woken up with burning phantom pains and a depressed glaze over his dark eyes. What the fuck was Richie going to do-- say, “I know you’re really having a hard time right now because of the whole violently-losing-your-arm thing, but like, I had a nightmare”? No. He’d kept it to himself. He’s continued to keep it to himself this whole time, even though Eddie has adjusted and healed and is in a much better place (mentally, physically, and geographically) than he was right after leaving Derry. 

Besides, it was just dreams. No matter how real they felt, no matter how upsetting they always were, they were just dreams.

(oh my god, he realizes, staring at himself in the mirror-- when stan killed himself, even before we knew, beverly knew, because she)

He blinks. Looks down at his phone. It’s two in the morning. But she has a six week old baby-- maybe she’s up doing parent stuff right now. It’s worth a shot. It’s not like she has her ringer on anyway, so it’s not like he’d wake her up if she isn’t already up. Who in their right mind doesn’t silence their phone before going to bed?

He makes the call.

“Hey, Rich,” she says, answering on the third ring.

“Thank God you’re awake,” he hears himself whisper. “Bev, I just had this terrible dream. Like, really terrible. Like, my pulse is all over the place and I feel kinda sick and I just checked Eddie’s pulse to make sure he’s actually alive terrible.”

“You mean you had a dream he died?” She asks. 

“Yeah. Like down in the sewers. I keep having dreams like that. Sometimes stuff is different, but he always fucking dies, and I just thought-- I mean, didn’t you have dreams about all of us dying ever since you saw the deadlights?”

“Yeah,” she says, sighing a little. “I didn’t know you had dreams like that. I stopped getting the bad dreams after we killed It, so I figured you’d be fine.”

He rubs at his face again. “But you had dreams about all of us dying,” he says, his voice shaky. “I just have dreams about Eddie dying different ways.”

“Different ways?”

“I mean it’s always because of the damn clown, but it kills him different ways. Sometimes it bites his arm off and he bleeds to death, sometimes it skewers him through the chest with a crab claw, sometimes it just kind of--” he gestures his hand vaguely, trying to think of how to explain it. “It throws him around the air a little, and then he lands, and he tries to say something, and he dies. No blood. But this time it was the one where he gets skewered through the chest and-- fuck, I left him for like a second because I thought he was okay, and when I got back to him he was dead. And you guys dragged me out of the house because I wouldn’t leave him.”

“Maybe it’s like… the deadlights are showing you what could have happened,” she suggests. He can hear the baby making little baby noises in her arms. “Different possible outcomes.”

(no, that’s not right, it’s so much heavier than that, it’s like-- it’s like these things actually happened and i was there and i lived through them and i’m remembering)

“Maybe,” he says weakly. 

“Maybe the deadlights are twisting reality,” she says. “Like how the clown used to make us see things that weren’t really there, you know?”

(or maybe the deadlights are blurring the lines between)

(between)

He can’t finish the thought. He doesn’t know.

“I bet that’s what it is,” he says uneasily. “When you had dreams about us all dying, were they just like… so fucking real, you didn’t know it was a dream until you woke up?”

“Yeah,” she confirms. “It was more like re-living a memory than anything else.”

“When you saw Eddie die-- was it like any of the stuff I just told you?” He asks, voice dropping back down to a whisper. He knows full well that he doesn’t want to know the answer, but he asks anyway. He has to.

She inhales. “Yeah. The thing about the crab claw through his chest.”

His breath catches in his throat, dizzying him, swirling the room unsteadily around him. He barely manages to avoid puking. “Fuck, Bevvie.”

“But it’s just dreams,” she tells him.

(if it was just dreams, we wouldn’t both see the same thing. if it was just dreams, you wouldn’t have known how stan killed himself before his wife told you what happened)

“Yeah,” he agrees, nodding his head, because the alternative sucks too damn much. “Just dreams. It’s just fucking with us.”

“You should go back to sleep,” she suggests. “I need to put the baby back in her crib anyway and I don’t want to wake Ben up.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says quickly. “Sorry for calling in the middle of the night. Talk to you later.”

“No problem, I was up anyway,” she says. There’s this quality to her voice, this tone she carries, that has always made him feel immense amounts of love toward her. It’s kindness and warmth and strength all rolled into one. “Night, Richie.”

He hangs up. Forcing air into his lungs, moving as quietly as possible, he makes his way back to the bed and gets in. Eddie, still asleep, rolls over, snuggling against him.

He takes his glasses off. Closes his arms around Eddie.

(see, dumbass, he tells himself; he’s as alive as they come, he’s fine and so are you, so you can go back to sleep now)

But that’s not really how it works.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!!! this one's kinda weird so thanks for sticking with me here :')  
if you liked it, please leave kudos and a comment!!!  
follow me on tumblr at pramcine or golden-geese!!


End file.
